The global food supply is also at risk, with yields of wheat, rice, corn and other major crops projected to drop by as much as 2% each decade for the rest of the century, even as demand rises.
Large discrepancies exist in the literature on the area available globally for cultivation of bio-energy crops: projected areas for bio-energy crops range from 0.6 to 37 million km, that is, 0.4 28% of the earth's lands except Greenland and Antarctica (Table 1).
Affiliated with the university are the Tribal Research Centre, the Lanna Thai Social Sciences Research Centre, the Regional Centre of Mineral Resources, the Industrial Economics Centre of Northern Thailand, the Anaemia and Malnutrition Research Centre, and the Multiple Cropping Project.
In terms of global resources, the report concludes that by 2015, nearly half of the world's population -- more than three billion people -- will be in countries lacking sufficient water, and that even more genetically modified crops or projects to desalt sea water will not substantially help.
The UN's drug-control agency admits that crop-substitution projects cover only a few areas.
Aqueduct systems hundreds of miles long have been built to supply growing urban areas and crop-irrigation projects.
As a result, community leaders here say, crop-substitution projects sponsored by the Colombian government have been irremediably damaged and their participants left impoverished.
Worse still, government and private creditors are nonetheless demanding that the loans made for crop-substitution projects like the fish farms must still be repaid, even though the enterprises themselves have been destroyed.
Echoing warnings last week from Pino Arlacchi, the top anticrime official for the United Nations, he said that crop-substitution projects were failing because help in building sugar and cotton mills had not materialized and that the Taliban have no other incentives to offer poppy growers.
